Blitz interview with our Health and Safety Expert Rayna Aleksieva

Rayna has been a Health and Safety Expert of the ETEM Gestamp team for five years. Her main functions are to ensure the health and safety of the company's employees, bringing working conditions in line with the requirements of legislation and corporate standards.

Rayna, you are one of the "Top Pilots" in ETEM Gestamp's new initiative to recognize effective employees. Could you tell us more about the challenges of your work in one of the most critical departments in a company's production?

Our department's main challenge is that "time is short." Health and safety is a broad field of application of knowledge and skills that we combine with the right and individual approach to people. Part of my job is the active interaction with different teams from the company in the conditions of rapid development and introduction of new technologies. But that's precisely what makes my work attractive.

How do you train employees on safety measures and ensure they follow them consistently?

We are responsible for a vast production facility and implement workplace safety training and briefing programs. We base our training on already established risks and monitoring of employee behavior. At ETEM Gestamp, safety comes first, and we are constantly developing and upgrading our internal policy and procedures. We also rely on our colleagues, who can always make suggestions and recommendations.

Do you have particular approaches you use to promote a safety culture in your company?

We follow a rigorous program to promote a safety culture with three fundamental pillars. The first of these is the individual treatment of each employee and daily communication of the observed good practices or gaps in safe behavior. For this purpose, our department constantly monitors employee behavior and ascertains what needs to be improved. Another essential task is continuously improving employees' awareness of health and safety issues through various training programs, regular health and safety campaigns, short visual messages to note identified problems and how to fix them, etc.

Finally, we are the department that must immediately respond to identified potential and actual health and safety issues within the company. In this direction, we use the Intelex recording system as the primary tool to record detected problems and determine corresponding improvement plans.

Do you have a trick for being productive and dealing with stress in the workplace?

I am still looking for it. Job satisfaction comes from completed tasks and their contribution to set goals.